Phantom Pains
by rawpotential
Summary: "So it's true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love." Years after her death, Kyle Spencer still misses Fiona Goode enough to try to divine some conversation out of her in his own way. He doesn't know how to use tarot cards, but he sure as shootin' can play gin rummy.


**Disclaimer: **I own nothing, other people own everything, and I just play around.

**Author's Note:** I always thought that Kyle might have a different view of Fiona than everyone else did, since his only real interaction with her involved her being quite good to him, even if it was for her own selfish reasons. My ASOIAF nerdiness slipped in at the end, so, sorry about that, but I love the idea of Fiona loving Melisandre, so there it is. This has a slight potential to become multi-chapter, with each chapter being a different character dealing with Fiona's death, but I'm unsure as of yet. Let me know how you feel about that idea!

As always, if you're interested in reading a story with a particular Fiona pairing or prompt, hit me up in reviews, on PMs here, or through my Tumblr (username: acascavel).

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Zoe offered to let Kyle use the spirit board the first time that she had caught him in the living room with the coffee table maneuvered under Fiona's portrait, staring like a lost little boy at the deck of cards the former Supreme had used to teach him how to play gin rummy, uncertain of how exactly to proceed or what exactly he was hoping to accomplish. Generous as the offer had been, the young man had declined. The spirit board was for witches and he wasn't sure it would work for him—and anyway, more to the point, he wasn't sure if he really wanted an answer to his summons. Knowing that she was trapped in the house would be almost as bad as knowing that she was out of reach, and so Kyle decided to keep to his own divinatory devices.

It had been many moons since that first time, and now Kyle knew his self-created ritual by heart. Greet the portrait like it was made of flesh and blood, drag the coffee table over under it, take two chairs from the kitchen and set them on opposite sides. Take the cards out of the false bottom of the far left kitchen drawer, shuffle them, deal two hands of 10, leave hers face down in front of the second chair, sit down, check his own. At the beginning, it had amazed him just how often his own hand went Gin; after it happened so many times that it went from the realm of statistically improbable to impossible, however, the new butler had realized that it was her way of signaling to him that she was present and ready to hear whatever he had to say.

The new butler was still amazed that his little magic-less ritual, really built only to control his surprisingly strong grief at her passing, actually worked—but he knew from the very beginning that it had more to do with her than with him, so he didn't spend much time dwelling on his surprise. He had never told anyone, not even Zoe, about its functionality. If they wanted to talk to Fiona, let them find their own way; this was his and his alone, tailored to their specific relationship, and God only knew if she would respond to anyone else using the same inquiry.

Then, of course, there was the sadder reason why Kyle kept his success to himself: he wasn't really sure that anyone else would _want_ to speak to Fiona, and the young man didn't want to have to acknowledge how much that would bother him. Nobody had ever asked Kyle about his relationship with the former Supreme, or even really seemed to notice that it existed. Even Zoe, who knew that Fiona had fixed him after his botched return to life, never seemed to stop to consider the deep debt that he owed to the blonde because of that.

When Fiona had brought him back from his undead stupor, she had given Kyle a gift greater than she knew: instead of owing his life to one woman, Kyle now owed it to two. Instead of having to propagate the legacy of Alicia Spencer, Kyle could choose instead to claim the legacy of Fiona Goode, and claim it he did, fiercely and silently, with his whole heart. It was a debt that he was never really sure she knew that he owed her, but it was a debt that he tried his hardest to repay every day with his protection of the coven. It was what she had desired of him, and he was proud to give her the service even in death.

Of course, Fiona was not a good person. Kyle knew this, but it didn't bother him. She had been good to him, and even though that goodness had been pragmatic, the young man didn't mind. Nobody was purely black or white; his time among the witches had certainly taught the young man that, and he had spent enough of that time with Fiona to know that it was true of her as well. She had been a woman like any other, with loves, successes, failures, dreams, desires, angels and demons, and Kyle considered himself blessed to have known her well enough to know a little of all of those parts of her. It was more of her than almost anyone else in the house had known.

Their first game of gin rummy had hardly been their last. While the girls had wrapped themselves up in their individual dramas, Kyle and Fiona had spent any spare hours that they happened to share together at this coffee table. They had sat together and spoken of nothing of importance through their words and everything of importance through their silences, playing cards with abandon, playing cards as though she would never die the world would never end.

She had died, however, and though it had been years, Kyle still felt the loss. He was the butler now, in charge of the house and loyal to the women who learned there; he was a quiet, affirming, unquestioning presence, happy to love his girlfriend and obey his Supreme, but this contentment did not stop him from grieving for the woman he had certainly considered to be his mother, and almost considered to be his friend.

So it was that Kyle found himself wandering down the stairs from the room that he shared with Zoe on the midnight just beginning Friday the 13th of July, on a night saved from unbearable heat and humidity by the gentlest of breezes coming through the large open windows of Miss Robichaux's Academy. The house was very dark despite its white trappings. All of the girls would be asleep at this hour—Cordelia kept a _very_ strict curfew—and Kyle was quiet in his pilgrimage so that he would not wake them.

He entered the sitting room respectfully, inclining his head as a greeting to all of the portraits on the walls before grasping the coffee table and lifting it up, walking it over below the one painting he really cared about so that no undue noise would be made by dragging.

"Hey, Fiona," Kyle greeted after he set the table down, adjusting it to get the angle just right. "Happy Friday the 13th, providing that it is already wherever you are. I guess I never thought to ask what time zone you're in."

He smiled at the portrait and padded softly into the kitchen to retrieve the chairs and cards, coming back and setting the chairs on opposite sides of the table, taking the cards out to shuffle them.

"It's a pretty night," he said, conversationally, as he started to deal. "The jasmine's all in bloom. It smells nice."

Fiona had smelled like jasmine, when she had been alive. Like jasmine and roses and white musk. Kyle had liked it. He'd found it just as sophisticated as it was pretty, very much like her.

The butler finished dealing and set the stack of unused cards down in the middle of the table, in between his hand and hers. He flipped his cards over to check them, leaving hers untouched.

"Gin," he said when he saw his hand, satisfaction in his voice. He set the cards down face-up, laced his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. "Good. I was hoping you'd be here tonight."

The wind blew a little stronger, and there was a hint of roses in its scent this time.

"Yeah, I know. Nowhere better to be." Kyle rubbed his face with his hand, his smile turning sheepish. "Me either, I guess. It's not so bad, though. The girls are nice. There are more of them every day, I swear to God, and some of 'em are just babies. We're going to have to install a nursery if this keeps up. I think it's good for Cordelia to have the littler ones around, though. Zoe likes them, too.

"It's not the same without you, Fiona Goode. I know I say it every time, but…every time, it's still true. There's so much light here, it feels like I'm going blind sometimes. I could use some shade, some shadow. It's like they've all moved on, and forgotten the horrors we've been through, and I'm stuck somewhere behind them, still trying to slog through."

Kyle crossed his legs, looking up at Fiona's timeless face.

"I guess you know what I mean. I'm literally a different person than I ever was. Parts of my body belong to my dead friends. I feel like I'm fighting myself sometimes. I can't just carry on and forget like everyone else, because these things aren't in my past; they're part of me every day. Literally part of my body and my blood. Was this what having cancer felt like?"

He paused as though she would answer. If she did, he didn't hear it. He never did.

"I hope not," he said, eventually, a little saddened by the thought, but he perked up immediately when he went to uncross his legs and felt a weight on his lap. "Oh! Enough darkness for now. I have a surprise for you!" He held up a thick, rectangular item: a book, taken from his room down to share, which he had settled in his lap upon sitting down. "George RR Martin finally got around to publishing _The Winds of Winter_! It just came out today. It's years and years late, I know, but I remember how much you loved the series. I picked it up on the way home from running some errands today, so I'm not very far in, but do you want to hear how the story goes? Oh, it's so good."

Zoe Benson watched her boyfriend from the doorway to the sitting room with a faint smile. She hated sneaking after him like this, knowing that wherever he went in the middle of the night must be private, but he had seemed moody for the past few days and she'd been worried. She had never imagined that he would still be trying to summon Fiona with gin rummy, but she couldn't complain. There were worse things he could be doing, and his exuberance over his new book was the cutest thing she'd ever experienced.

"Melisandre is back with a vengeance, Fiona, oh, you'll love that. _Oh_, and wait until you hear what's happening with Lady Stoneheart! Wakey wakey eggs and bakey Manderly pie, Freys." Kyle cackled a little and rubbed his palms together, cracking open the book more for effect than anything else, adjusting himself on his chair so that he was fully facing Fiona's portrait but could still look down at the writing in the dark. "OK, so it starts with an Arya chapter. As I'm sure you remember, when we last saw Arya, she was…"

Zoe shook her head a little and left Kyle to his own devices, unsure of what to make of the uncharacteristic rustling of the jasmine bushes outside of the hall window as she drifted back up to bed, soothed by the sound of Kyle's voice, growing fainter and fainter.

"…Oh man, and then she gets Needle back from under the stone outside the House of Black and White! Can you believe it? It's all very hair-raising and anxious and everything, and then after all of that excitement you would think that there would be, like, an Arianne or Cercei chapter, right? _Nope_. _Victarion. _So he's out floating around in his badass longboat and he's got the fire dude and the dragon horn…"

Zoe shut her bedroom door with a click, leaving Kyle alone with the humid summer night.


End file.
